New Features in Microsoft Teams – May 2018 update

5th May 2018

If you see the latest updates Microsoft has unveiled this May as part of Teams update, looks like Teams will replace Skype for Business as the communication tool for Office 365. Features like Group calls, Favorite important channels, Filter and Group by options etc. makes this update really interesting. In this article, let us discuss the Microsoft Teams updates in detail.

Send messages right from your command box

Without having to leave the page you are in, now it is possible to send chat messages directly from the command box. You just have to use the @ symbol and their name to kick start a conversation. Without switching context, now sending a message via Teams is possible. And that comes in handy in a lot of situations.

Contact anybody via their contact card

Just hover over someone’s profile picture to send a quick chat via their contact card. When you are in an open channel conversation and you would like to private chat with someone, this would be useful. Without even leaving your channel conversation, you can get in a quick chat with anyone in your organization.

Distribute a dial-in phone number

You can add someone outside of your organization to your group call. Also, you have the option of distributing a dial-in number for anybody to join the group call. However, this feature is available only in a group call for now.

Expiry reminder notifications

Now, you will get notifications that your Teams will expire shortly and asks you to renew. This will be useful when you go for a long vacation as this notification will pop up well in advance – actually a 30-day notice - to remind to you renew the product proactively.

Auto-favorite important channels

As a Team owner, when you create a new team or channel you can now auto-favorite the channels for the rest of your team. If you choose to auto-favorite the channel you create, that will automatically show up on all of your team member’s favorites list. That makes it easy to access the new channel. Team members however have the option to remove it from the favorite list if they don’t need.

Other notable updates

Microsoft Planner has quite some interesting updates to integrate even better into Teams. You now have a Schedule view, where you can get an overview of all the upcoming tasks. You can drag and drop and set dates to each of those items. The Charts View lets you stay up to date on the status of your projects and plans. And, the Filterand Group by options you can easily group tasks and move it to different categories together like “Assigned to”, “In progress” etc.

Sure, these updates make Microsoft Teams a lot better for collaboration. Hope you enjoyed this article. Let us know if we missed out any updates that are worth mentioning.

Arutselvan loves challenges for he knows challenges are the ones that make one fly great heights. A team-player who plays his game well beyond the SharePoint ground and supports the team on tweaking their systems, maintaining Office 365 licenses and more. He brings in innovation to the product with his out of the box thinking. He is also a Microsoft certified professional.